Humanities Summer Program Spotlight:

The Medieval Slavic Summer Institute Provides Rare Opportunities in Research

Each year, students and scholars of varying disciplines and countries visit Ohio State´s Hilandar Research Library/Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies (HRL/RCMSS). Although their academic fields and cultural backgrounds are diverse, each has a shared interest in Slavic studies and each chose the right destination for research—the HRL is home to the largest collection of medieval Slavic manuscripts on microform in the world.

This unique library includes holdings from over 100 monastic, private, museum, and library collections of twenty-one countries and over 5,000 manuscripts on microfilm written in the Cyrillic alphabet; and houses more than 700 early printed Cyrillic books on microform. Its microform holdings of several million pages range from the eleventh to twentieth centuries, with a particularly strong collection dating from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

In 1999, to introduce the library’s rich holdings to students and scholars as well as promote medieval Slavic studies, the HRL/RCMSS partnered with the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures to hold the first Medieval Slavic Summer Institute (MSSI), a four-week intensive summer program for outstanding graduate students from around the world held again in 2001, 2003, and 2006. Participants have ranged from Ph.D. candidates in Slavic folklore, to Slavic linguists, to art historians studying medieval manuscript ornamentation, and many others. The 2006 MSSI focused on practical Slavic paleography and readings in Church Slavonic.

The MSSI’s rigorous learning environment provides them with the opportunity to work with original manuscripts and to conduct their own individualized research. Many of the manuscripts are those to which they would otherwise not have access if not for the HRL.

"In medieval Slavic society everything important was recorded in manuscripts so they contain every aspect of society and life at that time, especially people’s beliefs. Much has been lost to us due to the ravages of time, so this work is for current and future generations, preserving and recording what we consider to be the ‘cultural DNA’ of a large portion of the world’s population," said Predrag Matejic, director of RCMSS and curator of the HRL.

"It has been a rare privilege and learning experience to work in the HRL and teach in the MSSI. We see students come in with novice skills and leave with the necessary expertise to conduct original research and make exciting new discoveries about the medieval Slavic heritage," said Daniel Collins, chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures.

For more information, visit the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies and the Hilandar Research Library Web site.